Newsletter Excerpt, January 31, 2019 -- "CF Ketel Marte and the Diamondbacks"

This is an excerpt from the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

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"The Diamondbacks have had a strange offseason, a hard one to explain. They’ve spent some money, but in ways that make it hard to see why. They’ve let one of their best players go and traded another. They’re sort of into a rebuilding process, but with a team that projects to be in the vicinity of .500 and with a $130 million payroll. They’re making internal personnel decisions, aligning their talent, in ways that don’t make a lot of sense. It feels like they’ve both wasted an opportunity to build on two winning seasons, alienated the locals, and still not done anything to make the 2020-22 Diamondbacks a threat in the NL West."

Newsletter Excerpt, January 29, 2019 -- "Bryce Harper and Manny Machado"

This is an excerpt from the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with Joe and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

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 "Look, the biggest reason why these two players have found surprisingly limited demand is the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The penalties for exceeding the luxury-tax threshold have been ratcheted up to the point of being a severe deterrent, especially for teams already projected over 90 wins, especially for teams who are already net losers in the revenue-sharing process. The last CBA was designed to keep the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Cubs from taking their baseball revenues and using them on baseball players. It’s working. Under a different rule set, we would not be having these conversations.

"However, there do seem to be baseball reasons as well. Harper and Machado, whatever their skills, are not Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. They don’t have the track records of sustained MVP-level performance. They didn’t have walk years that create great demand. They each come with questions about their defensive performance. Both play in an era where we don’t necessarily expect their next few seasons to be their peaks, followed by a slow decline."

Newsletter Excerpt, January 28, 2019 -- "Stasis and the Red Sox"

This is an excerpt from the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with Joe and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

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"There’s a strain of thinking that these large-market teams can afford the taxes and should accept these relatively small amounts -- approximately one win’s worth -- as a cost of doing business, but the costs are higher than they seem. There are monies not collected, kickbacks for large-market teams being under the tax threshold. There are the draft-pick penalties. The money itself may seem a pittance, but MLB tax dollars aren’t like your tax dollars, going to roads and schools and the military. There’s no greater good being financed, just additional cash being distributed first to players, then to teams under the threshold.

"So I can understand Boston’s quiet winter. It helps to have won the World Series, which tends to deflect fan and media criticism for a few months. That explains why Sox fans have been mostly quiet and those long-suffering Dodger fans so loud. Mostly, though, the Sox have explored the outer reaches of what a club can be expected to pay for a baseball team under the current rule set."

Newsletter Excerpt, January 25, 2019 -- "A.J. Pollock and the Dodgers"

This is an excerpt from the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with Joe and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

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"Even with all of these caveats, though, this seems like a strong signing. Pollock will average $14 million a season over the first four years of the deal, which means if he’s a two-win player, the Dodgers are ahead of the game. Having Pollock for center is insurance should Chris Taylor be needed at shortstop as Corey Seager returns from Tommy John surgery. The Dodgers went full Team Pretzel last year, and swapping out two non-center-fielders for Pollock makes it that much easier for Dave Roberts to do so again in 2019."

Newsletter Excerpt, January 23, 2019 -- "The Coming PEDocalypse"

This is an excerpt from the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with Joe and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $39.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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 "There is a very real chance that an entire two-year Hall of Fame cycle will be consumed by talk of sports drugs and magic pills and what is cheating, anyway? The only player outside that conversation projected to be on the 2021 ballot who got more than 25% of the vote this year (or projects to get that much in the intervening years), is Omar Vizquel. The 2021 ballot could be Clemens, Bonds, Manny Ramirez, Vizquel and then a bunch of players who haven’t made much noise like Scott Rolen, Jeff Kent and Todd Helton. Unless there’s a change of heart on those three, it’s likely that no one is elected in 2021.

"Then it gets horrifying, as Rodriguez and Ortiz join the mix in ’22. I could see a scenario in which voters, used to filling out deep ballots and struggling to do so, under pressure to elect someone after whiffing in 2021, push Omar Vizquel up the line ahead of three of the best players who ever lived. I’m unclear as to whether we’re still considering David Ortiz as a sports-drugs guy, but if enough people are, at least in his first season of eligibility, the 2022 election will probably be Vizquel or no one."

Newsletter Excerpt, January 22, 2019 -- "Sonny Gray and the Reds"

This is an excerpt from the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with Joe and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $39.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"As I’ve said before, if you put the Reds in a different competitive environment, I would see them differently. The NL Central, though, is a bear, as is the rest of the middle tier in the National League. In the AL, the Reds wouldn’t look that much different than the Twins and Rays and Angels. Here, even building a .500 roster, which they still may be short of doing, is just an afterthought, and at that, just getting their best players on the field at the same time projects to be a challenge."